Took a bit of a break from these but I'm back. Outside of wanting to relax going into the new year, I was just kind of stumped on which one to do next, as I had a few ideas I had been working out in my head. Oh and before we move on, Poparena reviewed Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes and he had his own re-write and thankfully outside of also going a bit more into the rivalry stuff, it was different from both of my ideas. And pretty good, I like how he did something I forgot to do: Have Lawn Gnomes getting revenge. Whoops.

Anyway, figured I'd do a double feature of two connected books today. The Dr. Maniac books from the HorrorLand and Most Wanted series are some of the more out there entries, and some of the messier ones. But they do have some charm in places and plenty of ways they could be better, so let's look at both separately.

Dr. Maniac Vs. Robby Schwartz

This one was odd, not just for the content but for it's almost clever in places, with some good ideas. Some of that is in the form of weird 4th wall breaks that won't quite fit into my re-write. This book has a bunch of fake outs where entire chapters are revealed to be a comic, and an twist involving the brother which could have worked if it made any sense. So we'll work with those and see if we can do anything with them.

Like the book proper, we'll begin with the family in the woods as we establish the personalities of the family. Except they seem a bit exaggerated, with Robby's brother Sam being incredibly wimpy and so on. Otherwise, things will be the same as book, including revealing this is all just a web comic Robby is working on. But in this version, it will be the only time we do this. It's a solid way to introduce everything, including Dr. Maniac and his crazy-ness, Stine just went overboard here. Robby is showing this little web comic to Sam and his friend Brooke and Sam is a bit upset that is portrayed like this.

Robby isn't a bully to Sam per say, but he is generally seen as a wimp and Robby doesn't always treat him with the most respect. This may be hard to pull off without Robby look too dick-ish, as even the book itself has some moments like that. Anyway, Robby has been using a free software to create his comics but the free trial has run out. He knows his parents likely won't pay for the full version, so he looks online for a different free software and finds something off this sketch-y website. Everything about it screams "virus" but he's desperate so he downloads it. And boom, everything he makes with it comes to life, including the big story with Dr. Maniac he starts creating. This part isn't needed but I wanted to explain how Dr. Maniac comes to life since the book doesn't do so and I figured this would work well enough.

With that, D. Maniac appears and kidnaps Sam, just like in the story. From there, things play out about the same as the actual book, with Robby trying to find where Dr. Maniac is and bumping into Purple Rage. Certain things can be tweaked here and there, but it doesn't matter how we get to the end point I'm planning out here. I may have Dr. Maniac sometimes pipe in on TVs and stuff so we can keep him as a presence, given he doesn't do much in the book until the end.

So in the climax, Robby finds Sam but Sam reveals he has turned to the dark side. While he was kidnapped, he and Dr. Maniac ended up talking it out and SAm told about how he hates how Robby and others look down on him. Dr. Maniac pulled out a sob story claiming he can relate and convinced Sam to become his evil apprentice so he can revenge on everyone who made fun of him. See, in the book Dr. Maniac turns out to be Sam himself, with a similar excuse to his dark to villainy. But it doesn't explain he even is Dr. Maniac or anything like that.

It's a good idea that makes no sense in execution, even by the standards of the twists in this series. So I'm basically fixing that here. We have Sam turning evil due to being looked down upon and not confiding in anyone about it, but he simply teams up with Dr. Maniac and things make sense , at least by Goosebumps standards.

As for what happens from there, we'll go the traditional route and have Robby realize that he can be a bit too condescending to Sam and is able to get him to back to the good side, and Sam realizes he could have actually talked to someone about this and whatnot. Oh and Dr. Maniac turns against because his evil, that's another reason Sam could change his mind about evil. Just like in the book proper, Dr. Maniac and his cohorts are defeated by simply deleting them.

Only here we have them simply be put in the recycle bin and the bin itself is not emptied, leaving a simple explanation for how Dr. Manic comes back to get his revenge in HorrorLand. Now, I actually like the idea of this all maybe being a comic that Robby wrote as an apology to Sam as he realized on his own that he doesn't treat him the best, but outside of wanting to avoid more fake outs, I actually want Dr. Maniac to be real with a clear explanation as to how it comes back, as in the actual book the fake out makes it so him being in the HorrorLand stuff doesn't really make sense.

So yeah, I kept things the same but played up the themes with Sam and cleared up the logic a tad. Everything else, even Dr. Maniac and Purple Rage's gimmicks, works fine enough for me. Not a whole to say for this one otherwise, the framework was honestly all there, it just needed some tweaking and not by as dumb with the fakeouts and stuff. It was slightly too complicated for its own good.

Now to move on.

Dr. Maniac Will See You Now

This one will be be a different from some of my other re-writes. Basically, this one has Dr. Maniac and others escaping from the comic world to this one and causing generally mayhem to the protagonist, Richard Dreezer, has to deal with. The by itself is fine, but the book got bogged down with Richard's crappy life to the point where it got more sad than fun. Not to mention the annoying nonsense on Dr. Manaic's part being cranked up this time around. There's also a reveal with Richard's doctor being evil that doesn't add much, on top of an overly cruel ending.

The thing, my fix would be very boring: Ditch, or tone down Richard's life and just focus on the comic book world stuff. Maybe have an arc where he realizes he can stop the villains with his own smarts instead of constantly hoping for powers to pop up, and give it a more traditional ending. The fix is an easy one, to the point where you don't need a traditional re-write. Yeah, you'll still have some annoying bits but that's more subjective, as long as the story is better structured and Richard's life is less cartoon-ishly terrible, than the readers opinion on how funny Dr. Maniac is can be forgiven. I would make his plan crazier though, in the book he's really all talk as he barely seems like a Maniac beyond saying stupid things.

So for a re-write, I'm just gonna make my own story with only a bit of the framework of the book. I mean, hey this is technically a fanfic, so why not go all out. Anyway, Richard's life is still not very good, but here it's toned down to just being generally meh and not having the awful parents or anything like that. He's got a bully and perhaps his parent's at the best. Things that aren't terrible to deal with as it is, but things he wish he didn't have. He is big into comic books, as that world has larger than life villains to deal with, which he thinks would be more fun than his more mudane problems. Perhaps he has a disney princess problem of wanting more than this life.

One day he visits the doctor but he has been replaced by a new one who seems odd. He's trying to appear normal but keeps saying wack-y things. He gets a shot that makes him feel weird but otherwise he's able to move on with his day. Eventually he gets to get powers, and at first he wants to have fun with them. However, it seems that he can only use for evil as every attempt to use it to help people ends with them being hurt. It doesn't take long for them to figure that he's beyond some of the odd accidents going on, even if not everyone jumps to "he's using evil powers"., so thus he becomes even more of an outcast.

During all this, he seems glimpse of some figure following around but he can't figure out what is going with that. Eventually, Dr. Maniac pops up and reveals he is behind everything. He had escaped from the comic book world because he got bored of the comic characters that have been around forever and wanted a new one, and a possible apprentice to help him in his maniacal evil. He spotted Richard and figured he would make for a good villain, as he had the motive needed. So he disguised himself as a doctor and gave the shot, which is where the powers come from.

This is also why the powers seemed to be evil in nature no matter what, they came from Dr. Maniac. He believes that Richard should use these powers to get revenge on all the people who wronged him, especially the bullies. He asks Richard to join him and all that. Richard considers it, as part of him did enjoy being able to get revenge on his enemies. However, he snaps out of it and realizes that the reason that he likes superheroes is that they do what is right no matter right...and also that Dr. Maniac is a dangerous maniac and should not be teamed up with.

So with that Richard turns on Dr. Maniac and...that's about what I got. Don't have ideas for exactly how the ending plays out but you get the idea. This version is is yet another story to explore the dangers of blind revenge on all that, this time through the superhero/villain concepts. This touches on what it means to be a hero vs a villain, and I think that can spice up some themes that even I have done before. I think it's a solid idea to explore and I borrowed the Dr. Root twist to an extent here and actually made it matter.

There's a few other areas you can get into through this idea, and you can come up whatever ending you want as really as long as you don't get too unfair like the actual book did, you can do anything. Actually, the book has him ditching his bad life and going into the comic world for good, for if I would just have it end happily from there instead of doing what the book did. Either way, I think my idea is a solid one.

Oh and I'll just admit I borrowed a lot of this idea from the Nightmare Room book My Name is Evil, so at least Stine already covered this idea before. It can still work for this story though, given what I did with it. And yeah, that about covers these books. We got a re-write that keeps the same basic concepts but cleans things up to make the madness stronger and one where I throw out the whole story and do something different.

A decent of pair of re-writes this time. I may end up doing more that are as only-kind of connected, like the latter one. I also want to branch out to do some other Stine series re-writes, like Nightmare Room or Fear Street, we'll see. If I do, I'll still keep this Goosebumps focused, it just might be fun to branch out these re-writes I suppose. Either way, I got plenty of GB re-writes to explore in the future.

Until my next one, that will be all. Take care.